The Antagonism is The Real — Zizek, The Negative Principle & The Neuroscience of Therapeutic Philosophy
There’s a mystery and excitement in autodidactism.
I wonder if I would ever have given the time to Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Zizek if I had not stumbled across a copy of Living in the End Times a few weeks ago in the used bookstore across from my clinic.
The book darts about, providing sociopolitical commentary on once hot-button topics and film references, feeling decidedly dated to its original publication in 2010. Despite the sense of being transported back in time to a late 00s public radio debate, the writing leaves no doubt that Zizek is a rigorous and discursive thinker whose original conceptualization of the social and political scene of the time manifests in the text in its pristine original, unaffected by the meaning-making of the collective at the time.
The thread of my curiosity proceeded as follows: the chance encounter at the used bookstore, then Zizek’s Wikipedia page, then to Amazon for a Prime One-day delivery of Zizek’s 1989 magnum opus The Sublime Image of Ideology.
My introduction to Zizek is an object lesson in the cognitive paradox presented in The Sublime Image of Ideology. Intellectual curiosity, that desire for the power of knowledge fueled by what Nietzche would call the “will to knowledge”, wraps itself around a traumatic psychological void that is only ever temporarily satisfied by the reflexive self-awareness of the drive itself — a knowledge of the will to knowledge — only to turn back on itself and repeat, attempting to fill the negative space once again.
As Zizek would have it, the infinite linguistic and cognitive re-interpretability of positive assertion gets us no closer to knowing what is really real. Rather, it veils a process of fantasy, desire, and antagonism that shapes our pursuit of what is Real and, as I will posit, could provide a clinical mechanism for inducing cognitive surrender in the troubled mind with corresponding neurological balance in the material brain.
Zizek, Lacan, and the “object petit a”
Slavoj Zizek draws from the work of Hegel, Marx, and Freud in developing his social and political theory. But Zizek’s most salient influence is the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who wrote extensively in the 1950s-1970s and integrated the structural and linguistic concepts popular at the time with traditional Freudian psychoanalysis.
In a public appearance filmed in the 2005 documentary Zizek!, an audience member accuses Zizek’s work of disguising a dogmatic Lacanianism. After offering the retort that his overt criticism of Lacan differentiates him from, for example, the dogmatism of many Derridians, Zizek calls the interlocuter out for “knocking on an open door”. Zizek is an unabashed Lacanian.
In The Sublime Object of Ideology (which inspires this article) Zizek synthesizes Marxist social theory with Lacan’s psychoanalytic approach to ideology.
Here’s a quick breakdown:
Zizek starts with a common Marxist defense of communism — that real-world applications of Marxist theory are “not real communism”. Zizek uses this statement as a jumping-off point, not for elaborating a political theory, but for further discussion of the function of ideology at the level of individual psychology. Ideology, according to Zizek, veils a sublime object that differs in essence from the Real that it represents and holds an uncanny influence over cognition at the individual and group levels.
In Lacanian theory, ideology is separated from the Real by fantasy. From the clinical perspective, “passing through” the fantasy resolves the conflict arising from the gap between the Real and the ideal that can, if it remains unconscious, become the object of neurosis or obsession. What exists at this gap is a non-thing that Lacan refers to as the objet petit a. Objet petit a is the psychic disturbance’s object of projection that arises from the difference between the sign and that which it signifies and that is insatiably out of touch with both objective reality and that which can be grasped explicitly in phenomenological consciousness.
Objet petit a (“ petit a” is French for “lower case a”) differs from Lacan’s capital “A” symbol which he uses to represent the ever-present Other. The objet petit a is a reflection of an attempted psychology formed in reaction to the conceived perceptual gaze of the Other (the Other being the superegoic determiner of the ideological ethic and/or adjudicator of its Realness or acceptability).
This reflection masks a specific kind of desire that can never be completely assuaged, just as an ideology can never be completely realized. This desire presents an infinite repetition of hedonistic goal setting, be it for pleasure proper, or for the manifestation of an ideology that presumes to satisfy the ever-present gaze of the Other. Although, the object petit a escapes resolution, it is infinitely sourced by this insatiable desire (what Lacan calls jouissance) to see it thus resolved. Zizek’s sublime object of the ideal then is not the ideal itself but the ever-negated objet petit a, fed and sustained by the surplus desire (that little bit of attractive valence) that draws one repeated back to the ideal. Zizek describes this as a traumatic kernel or void, like a nebulous black hole of negative space.
The Antagonism is The Real
In a subheading in The Sublime Object titled “Antagonism as Real”, Zizek defines the Lacanian Real as “a hard kernel resisting symbolization, dialecticization, persisting in its place, always returning to it” (Zizek, 2019, p. 181) . Zizek acknowledges that post-structuralism and linguistic philosophy have addressed the limitations of semantic discussion about what is real, concluding that language cannot exist outside the context of its commentary. Debates about meaning always dance at an epistemological distance from the Real to which the language refers. A text has literary value only of its own merit and presents but an experience of truthiness that will never accurately represent the Real that transcends the linguistic context of the discussion (Zizek, 2019, p. 172).
Zizek explains that, although you can never quite put your finger on the Real by accurately representing it with symbols (because it is a void-like essence that defies objectification), it paradoxically “exercises a certain structural causality, it can produce a series of effects in the symbolic reality of subjects” (Zizek, 2019, p. 183) . As such, the antagonism between the obscurity of Lacan’s object petit a and jouissance becomes the Real, the fundamental essence of reality.
He provides some paradoxical examples of antagonism as the Real. One is the experience of falling in love. True love can not be forced, it is only legitimate if it occurs freely. But if an individual were to date several people simultaneously with the goal of choosing who they would fall in love with, they would soon find that the decision had been somehow made for them. They will have fallen in love in such a way that they are no longer free to feel otherwise. Second, Evil. From the collective stance, evil is the embodiment of the act that brazenly causes suffering to others. However, if a so-called evil person is isolated in a jail cell with no opportunity to harm others, Evil no longer depends on its manifest action. Evil now appears to the onlooker to be embodied in a person in the absence of any measure by which to determine an individual’s evilness (Zizek, 2019, p. 187).
The Real is not the flawed attempt at resolving these paradoxes, but their inherent antagonism. The Antagonism is the Real.
The realness of the antagonism (as distinct from the inadequacy of assertions of the Real) appears in the American sociopolitical landscape in hot-button issues like the irreducibility of ethical and material perspectives on abortion. Or the alternating places of race and the racialized in the explicit discourse of implicit bias. We feel the jouissance at work in surplus valence that emerges when we sense (as Jung would have it) our shadow-self in our political opponent (Jung, 2012). The one thing that both parties are unified in at the fiercest moments of opposition, is the antagonism itself.
According to Zizek, as “each pole passes immediately into its opposite; each is already in itself its own opposite” (p. 194). This point of realness can be passed over (as if the moment the two poles met were missed, and one must wait for the opportunity to miss them again) but the Real will never be reduced to a positive object. It remains a traumatic unfillable void. The impossibility of the negation of the negation is the Real.
The Negative Tradition in Philosophy
In The Sublime Object, Zizek only briefly glances at the literary art of deconstruction as outlined by post -structuralist philosophy. (As I discussed in an earlier article about Derrida’s grammatology, the art of deconstruction demonstrates that language, as a system of symbolic signification of thought, can never really mean what it professes — trace, connotation, and the thought behind the thought negates the positive linguistic statement ad infinitum.) Zizek’s nod to this school precedes his elaboration of an alternative approach to the philosophy of negation that, like post-structuralism, follows Hegel’s philosophy of the negative in The Phenomenology of Spirit. This thread of thought proceeds from Hegel to Neitzche, Freud, the post-structuralists, and post-modernism. Eastern philosophical approaches and Christian mysticism also yield place to this negative void at the root of human psychology.
This contrasts with the positive assertion of Judeo-Christian philosophy, Stoicism, Idealism, and Science that make positive attempts at epistemology, rather than highlighting the futility of it. In lay conceptualization, philosophy’s position is similar to assertive religion’s, as the arbitrator of truth, value, ethics, morality, etc. An individual’s “philosophy of life” refers to the guiding belief system and worldview that frame decision-making, a positive assertion of cognitive schemata that underpin behavior.
For example, the Christian religion (of which my Alma Mater, the Watchtower organization claims to be a part) bases a philosophy of belief in the positive assertion of God’s being. The agnostic’s experience of alienation from God (recognized as persistent despite the neurotic and ritualistic appeal to the symbolic cleansing blood of the Christ) is articulated by the Christian mystic philosophers (such as Meister Eckhart who spoke of the necessity of godliness in the absence of god) who recognized the traumatic flaw in the closed circle of Christian dogma. The intensity of Religious Trauma PTSD is commensurate with the extent of the lack of reflexive self-awareness on the part of the practitioner of the void that the fundamentalist doctrine attempts (but never quite succeeds) to fill.
On the other hand, the experience of reading a robust philosophy of the negative (in which I will include Zizek or Hegel) is of contrasting function. Highlighting the sensory void at the center of inevitable intellectual failure, the philosophy of negation does not assert but dissolves truth and knowledge.
The experience of reading a Zizek is comparable to the experience of the meditative practitioner’s “no-self” — the exhaustion of positive cognition of the subject. From the clinical perspective, the therapeutic benefit of Buddhism’s deconstruction of the self is quite simple. When an individual takes the time to realize the falsity of the self, they are bound to take it less seriously in the future. This release of the self has a moderating impact on self-based neurotic and obsessional pursuits and social interactions that reinforce elements of falsity at the expense of mental wellness. The intense positivistic effort required to think about thought, bringing attention to thought, then attention to attention, then attention to the attender, exhausts this cognitive mechanism and results in surrender to thoughtlessness, and selflessness (in the amoral sense of the word).
Paradoxically, the illusion of “no self” is negated when one realizes one has experienced it. After all, who experienced the illusion of the self? The reflexive awareness of the subject is paradoxical. This paradox could correspond to a shift in counter-inhibitory neural networks associated with self-related and non-self-related content, the repetition of which could produce greater neuro flexibility and contribute to homeostasis in the material of the brain (Northoff, 2016).
The felt experience in following this cognitive exercise of negation of both the subject and object in a philosophy of negation is not surrender to the superior intellect of the author or a dismissive attitude toward the irrelevance of the philosophical dialectic resulting from an inability to follow the intellectual line of thought. It is an experience of the negation at the organismic level and a return to the sensory fullness of immediate existence.
The extension of existential philosophy to psychotherapy often misses this crucial distinction between the positive assertion of meaning, value, individuality, freedom, etc., and the negative power of the absurd. Supporting the client as they create meaning, value, and purpose out of the void of the absurd may be beneficial at certain junctures of life and crisis stages. But the absurd is not a meaningless chasm to be resolved by the deluded conceptualization of a personal value system, the atavistic rigidity based on what caused the client to experience the absurd in the first place, which will inevitably be negated in time by the re-emergence of the void in consciousness. The lack of reflexive self-awareness of the void exacerbates its traumatic pull, causing a feedback loop of absence and jouissance, disrupting psychological balance at the individual level.
The therapeutic moment occurs when an individual feels safe enough to thoroughly experience the absurd in the presence of the ontologically secure practitioner. The ontological security of the practitioner provides a contagious sense of safety in the face of the client’s realization that despite the positive meaning, value, moral, and ethical system that one creates out of the vacuum, the vacuum is ever-present. The existential crisis is never resolved. The antagonism is the Real. In the meaninglessness, one creates meaning. In the nihilism one creates ethic. In atheism, godliness. In the objectification of the oppressor, phenomenological bliss.
Existentialism’s strength is in exposing the paradox of the object by juxtaposing meaning, value, freedom, and responsibility against the nihilism of the absurd. What it fails to attain, is the paradox of the subject, the falsity of the subject grappling with the meaningless of existence. Neglecting the paradox of the subject in existential counseling can lead to a client’s construction of worldviews built on a precarious foundation — the positive assertion of the subject doing the construction.
Clinical Usefulness of The Antagonism as The Real
Famously, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung included ideology among the objects of addiction.
“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism” (C.G. Jung)
Modern neuroscience has taught us that addiction belongs not to the addictive substance and experience of pleasure in the brain but to the anticipation of approach and withdrawal from the substance. Dopamine is released in expectation of the pleasurable substance. The addiction is to this anticipatory excitement (Linnett, 2020), the jouissance. The object of addictive pleasure is not the substance or ideology itself, it is the object petit a at the center of the traumatic wound causing the addiction. Repeat offense is the attempt to destroy the traumatic kernel with surplus desire. Like the infinite work of intellect in articulating the negative void of the Real, the addict returns to the substance in an attempt to close the gap between the Real and the psychological object of their traumatic wound. Addiction can be conceptualized as a manifestation not of a personality flaw or lack of self-control (traditional Western sin) and not of pathogenetic disorder (as in the Medical doctrine of addiction as a disease) but as the manifestation of a psychological wound (Schenberg, 2018), a traumatic negative space, like a black hole that paradoxically feeds and consumes, feeds and consumes, feeds and consumes.
The shame of traditional approaches to addiction, and the overempathy of the traumatological both neglect to address the jouissance not in the pleasurable experience of the addictive substance or activity, but in the duality of valence in the trauma itself — the hedonistic joy of self-hate, the moment of bliss in submission to domination, the sweet itch of the wound.
The traumatic void is the place of Freud’s ambivalence of emotion. The traumatic void is a non-thing, the antagonism itself, the oscillation between conflicting emotional experiences and the self’s attempts to resolve it. The ontologically secure individual can rest in this antagonism as Real and allow the frictive cathexis in subcortical regions to break through the defenses of cortical processing, resulting in insight and emergence of fresh cognitive solutions. The bodily experience of the antagonism forces the individual (in the Gestalt tradition) to explore the sensory, the affective, and alternative dimensions of consciousness unconnected to cognitive schemata or object relations.
Toward a Neurophilosophy of Negation of the Negation
The effect of reading a Zizekian approach to the paradox of both the subject and the object, from the experiential point of view, is an exhaustion of cognition. This exhaustion could facilitate a shifting state of consciousness. By following a thought experiment of suspension of both subject and object in infinite negation — an awareness of the reflection of the reflection occurs, such that the cognitive defense mechanisms are exposed to themselves.
This is the function of the philosophy of the negative from the clinical perspective. To the extent that such an intellectual process exhausts cognition, the individual is brought to a state of altered consciousness. In the absence of spiritual metaphysics and the medical system’s quasi-religious use of personality as a theoretical assumption upon which to build the nosology of psychological disorders, depression, anxiety, obsession, and compulsion can be conceptualized as altered states of consciousness. The psychotherapist’s goal is to alter the client’s state of consciousness, such that neurological and endocrinological conditions facilitate neuroplasticity and balance in the organism of the brain (Cozzolino, 2006). The neurotic repeated thought patterns of anxiety, or stubborn grip on defense mechanism that has become intractable for the client represent painful states of consciousness. The psychotherapist attempts to repeatedly elicit an altered state of consciousness in the client such that the cathartic release, and functional, neurochemical, and neuroelectric processes associated with such an alteration are potentiated in the client’s brain over time.
Acknowledgment of the antagonism that arises from intellectual contemplation of infinitely irreducible poles as the Real, releases the mind from the disrupted state of consciousness that corresponds to the psychological suffering of cognitive overwork. The psychotherapist’s elucidation of this insight in the client begins the aforementioned neurological cascade.
From the neurophilosophical perspective, the philosophy of negation, the experience of the paradox of both the subject and object can be conceptualized as a shift from the neural correlates of noetic to anoetic consciousness.
“Neural correlates of noetic (knowing) consciousness relate to various memory abilities, especially declarative (factual) memory, whereas anoetic consciousness is heavily linked, to raw sensorial and perceptual abilities, to various subcortical affective processes, and intrinsic affective value structures, and hence, is more related to limbic and paralimbic structures associated intrinsically with the more implicit free-flow of affective consciousness (Vandekerckhove et al, 2014).”
I felt the jouissance in the bookstore. Intrigued by the potential for new knowledge — intellectualism, my objet petit a, my Nietzchean will to knowledge, I moved to the noetic.
The philosophy of the negative brings me back to the anoetic. And I rest in the futility of my quest — the falsity of all that can be known by an illusory subject.
Thanks for the catharsis.
References:
Cozolino, L. (2006). The social brain. Psychotherapy in Australia, 12(2), 12–7.
Lacan’s Concept of the Object-Cause of Desire (objet petit a). The Dangerous Maybe (2019). https://thedangerousmaybe.medium.com/lacans-concept-of-the-object-cause-of-desire-objet-petit-a-bd17b8f84e69
Vandekerckhove M, Bulnes LC, Panksepp J. The emergence of primary anoetic consciousness in episodic memory. Front Behav Neurosci. 2014 Jan 3;7:210. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00210. PMID: 24427125; PMCID: PMC3879583.
Jung, C. G. (2012). Man and his symbols. Bantam.
Linnet, J. (2020). The anticipatory dopamine response in addiction: A common neurobiological underpinning of gambling disorder and substance use disorder?. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 98, 109802.
Northoff, G. (2016). Neuro-philosophy and the healthy mind: Learning from the unwell brain. WW Norton & Company.
Schenberg, E. E. (2018). Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: a paradigm shift in psychiatric research and development. Frontiers in pharmacology, 9, 323606.
Zizek, S. (2019). The sublime object of ideology. Verso Books.
Originally published at https://thomaswmoore.substack.com.
